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Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

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Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#421

Post by robbrown451 »

femto113 wrote: post #228
robbrown451 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much land and structures to parking, there is no need to have cars sit idle for 95% of their existence, and no need to search for parking spots and walk long distances. Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it…

> It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle. This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. The more I use them the more I wish for a world where every car was shareable: you need to go somewhere? you simply get into the nearest parked car and drive it to where you want to go. And, unlike autonomy, there are…

Well you still need to park them somewhere, but yeah you could have less cars. And they don't work if you can't drive (or are drunk). And it is more complicated if you need one with a car seat or other special accommodations.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#422

Post by xyzzyz »

pritovido wrote: post #193
rayiner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read an book on space/aerospace engineering from the 1980s and look at how many things happened. Supersonic was a huge bust. (The Concorde is closer in time to wooden biplanes than to today. Routine supersonic travel still nowhere on the horizon.) Energy technology has been a huge disappointment. When I grew up, we were going to have nuclear fusion, expanding the scope of what society can do. Today we’re back to wind…

Windmills' technology has improved dramatically, like also nuclear fusion's. We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency. Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money. We have nuclear tech because Manhattan pro…

We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.

No, Manhattan project took trivial amount of money by today's standard. It costed less than the rounding error in typically given federal budget figures for past few decades.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#423

Post by jussij »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #333
notatoad wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in this thread are way too hung up on the "what if cars get attacked" problem. Just because you can't solve every problem, doesn't mean you can't have a usable product. Cars today don't have any defense against people dropping bricks or pouring paint off an overpass, but somehow the system still works.

They do actually, the humans driving the car can respond to a threat that an autonomous car would have to be programmed to avoid

I'm not sure humans have the reaction time to avoid an object thrown from an overpass.

On the contrary, over the years I've read on many occasions how drivers and passengers have been seriously injured or killed by the morons who get a kick out of dropping objects from an overpass.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/wilson/mt-juliet...

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#424

Post by erik_seaberg »

jakeogh wrote: post #408
mprev wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your framing of the issues seems so far removed from the rest of the discussion that I can only assume I’m misunderstanding your point. Could you elaborate?

The links I provided contain significant context, can you be specific on what is unclear? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108631

They sell self-heating canned food. It's not a claim about sapience.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#426

Post by wwweston »

rdiddly wrote: post #214
wwweston wrote: post #32

Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is. Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving. If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when…

What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW! Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.…

I quite like trains. I hope someday the US gets back to having better rail service.

Highway-autonomous vehicles would give you the benefits of rail service plus arbitrary departure times, more direct routes, on-demand route changes, and you're traveling in a vehicle that you can use for first and last mile and intra-city travel.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#427

Post by robbrown451 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #366
mavhc wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still better than humans, humans kill 3000 people using vehicles every day, and most of those aren't even trying

There is no evidence that automated driving systems are any safer than human drivers, or that they ever will be.

There is a lot of evidence that technology tends to improve over time.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#428

Post by joe_the_user »

_greim_ wrote: post #321
colordrops wrote: post #165

I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the…

To put this in perspective, imagine this hypothetical conversation happening a century ago: "I have this new auto-mobile concept which doesn't require a horse and which can go fast; I envision up to fifty miles per hour. It will require a smooth, hardened road surface, but that will be achievable someday." "Forget about it. We already have millions of miles of roads, which are bumpy, made of dirt, and hard to build a…

You can compare these levels of progress, sure but that doesn't mean the comparison is valid. Lots of people dismissed flying cars in the 60s and heck, they were right, the problem is fundamentally different.

The difference because the horse-to-auto transition and the auto-to-self-driving-auto is that autonomous cars solutions are inherently fragile and cars reasonably robust. (Flying cars are inherently fragile too - the problem isn't get a car-like-thing to fly, it's getting it to not hit things).

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#429

Post by SECProto »

Anarch157a wrote: post #393
SECProto wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item. If original commenter is correct that infrastructure meets halfway, I wouldn't expect self driving cars transition to happen fast at all - maybe on highways first, and busy city streets, later secondary roads. But that kind of thing would result in a decades long transition, and I would estimate it as never being fully autonomous (if beacons die,…

All it takes is a little bit of rain and hundreds of traffic lights go haywire in my city. What makes you think those beacons would fare any better? Politicians don't a crap for long term maintanance of little visibility infrastructure like that, so they're poorly funded. And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.

What is wrong with the traffic lights in your city would be the much more interesting question here. Everywhere I know, traffic lights work as long as their power supply is intact

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#430

Post by _red »

lsc wrote: post #337
_red wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you see insurance working? why would drivers be responsible to have insurance when the car is completely controlled by bigcorp programmers?

Seems like it would mostly be the manufacturers that would have to insure the cars, at least for the expensive part (liability) For me? I'm a self-driving skeptic, but... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it, (I mean, a reasonable amount of insurance, at least a statistical life worth) I'd ride in the thing. I think that's an honest signal.

>... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it,

Its not just the manufacturers, who is underwriting all that insurance?

Ford sells approximately 2.3M vehicles per year, imagine if 50% of self-driving...over a 5 year period that 5.5M cars...if each one needs to carry a potential 1M policy thats an incredible amount of liability on someone's balance sheet. (even if you say the policy is only 100K thats still $576B in liability)

Thats only for Ford, add in all vehicles manufacturers and extend that to 10-15 years into the future and thats an incredible amount.

However there is nothing to say that a new laws won't be passed to allow manufacturers to escape liability. Most likely this is what will happen (see vaccine courts, etc)

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